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The Namgyal Institute for Research on Ladakhi Art & Culture (NIRLAC) has won a 2012 Global Vision Award for preservation from Travel + Leisure for work at Sumda Chun, a twelfth-century Tibetan Buddhist monastic complex in the Indian Himalayas.

WMF has been a partner of NIRLAC since 2000, and has supported conservation work at Basgo Gompa—another Tibetan Buddhist complex on the 2000 Watch—and Sumda Chun. The Global Vision Award jury praised the importance of the conservation work, noting that it has the potential to double “as a model for other religious sites in need of repair.”

WMF is honored to have partnered with NIRLAC on the Sumda Chun project, which also won an "award of excellence" from UNESCO’s Asia-Pacific Heritage Awards for Culture Heritage Conservation in 2011. Work on the main structures finished in 2010, and the final component of the project, to be completed next spring, is the conservation of a small chorten, or stupa, containing wall paintings.